The two-website problem quietly hurting Scottish shops on Google

Here's a pattern we found at three separate Perthshire businesses in one month. A shop gets a new website built. The new site goes live on a new address. And the old website... just stays there. Still live, still in Google, sometimes still telling visitors "we've moved, click here to re-register".

Why it hurts

Google now sees two websites claiming to be your business, and it has to guess which one is real. Years of accumulated reputation, every mention, every link from a local paper or supplier or food blog, points at the old address. The new site starts from nothing. The usual result: both rank worse than the old one did alone, and a chunk of your customers land on the abandoned version, with old prices, old products, and a re-register nag.

How it happens to sensible people

Nobody does this on purpose. A new web company builds on a fresh domain because the old login details are lost, or the old developer is unreachable, or the new platform made it easier. Everyone's focused on launching the new site; retiring the old one is nobody's job. Sound familiar? It's the same reason websites go stale in the first place.

How to spot it

Search your business name and look at every result on the first two pages. If two different web addresses both show your business, you have the problem. Also try any old domain you remember owning; if it still loads something, that something is competing with you.

The fix, and why it's worth doing properly

The fix is a permanent redirect map: every page of the old site pointing to its equivalent on the new one, so visitors land in the right place and Google transfers years of reputation to one address. Done right it's about a day's work and keeps paying off for years. Done wrong (a single redirect to the homepage, or just switching the old site off), most of that value is lost. This is a typical rescue fix for us.